Five Best: Stefan Kiesbye

on the dark side of small towns

Stefan Kiesbye

Jan. 4, 2013 2:58 p.m. ET

Winesburg, Ohio

By Sherwood Anderson (1919)

1. Sherwood Anderson is a writer for whom the achingly mundane is a source of both cruelty and wonder. His "Winesburg, Ohio" is at once a love letter, an elegy and a disturbing portrait of 19th-century rural America. A work of singular eloquence, it is written in the sparest of prose—a style that inspired Hemingway. The protagonist, George Willard—a young reporter whom Anderson describes as "full of big words"—navigates the narrow streets and small ambitions...